How to Mark Up the Bible without Marking in Your Bible

I find it incredibly difficult to study the Bible without underlining, circling, highlighting, drawing arrows, and writing notes. However, once a passage is all marked up, it’s hard to make any additional notes or highlights. Furthermore, if I am highlighting and emphasizing one particular theme in a book of the Bible, it makes it hard to come back later and emphasize a different theme of that book. So here is a little Bible study “hack” that you might find useful:

Step One:

Go to Biblegateway.com. In the search box, type in the chapters you want to study. For instance, if you are studying the book of Ephesians, type in, “Ephesians 1-6.” Choose any translation, then hit, “Search.”

Step Two:

When I am studying a passage, I like to remove the verse numbers, headings, etc. so that I can really focus on the text. To do that, click on the gear icon.

Step Three:

Now click on the printer icon (just to left of the gear icon you clicked on in step two). This will pull up a clean, printable page with just your Bible text on it.

Step Four:

At this point you could simply print this page on your printer by going to the “File” menu and choosing “Print“. You can now mark up your physical copy of the book of Ephesians to your heart’s content without marking in the pages of your actual Bible.

Step Five (Mac Only):

However, if you have a Mac computer and an iPad, you can follow these additional steps and do what I do. From the print menu, choose, “Open PDF in Preview.”

Step Six (Mac Only):

At this point we have created a PDF of the entire book of Ephesians, without any verse numbers or headings. Now we just need to “AirDrop” it.

Step Seven (Mac Only):

Once you receive the file on your iPad, you can open it in an app that allows you to annotate the file. Personally, I use and love the GoodNotes app.

Step Eight (Mac Only):

Mark up your digital copy of the book of Ephesians.

I hope that this gives you some ideas for marking up a separate copy of the text. I certainly find there are time when I want my highlights, notes, and markings in my actual Bible, but there are other times when I need to mark up a separate copy and I’ve found this process easy, simple, and effective.